LOL, mostly playing around with Photoshop. I've been using it since version 4.

As for the filters, try downloading some from Adobe Studio Exchange and see how they're made, you can pretty much reverse engineer all of them to learn the "tricks". That's how I first learned the beveled metal look.

Even some of the action sets on the Studio Exchange let you see all the steps that were done to get a really cool effect, there's a lot of crazy photoshop people out there lol.